Dead Crazy a Jenny Cain Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

Book Overview

Award-winning author Nancy Pickard has been receiving high acclaim for her mystery series starring sleuth Jenny Cain. This time Cain finds herself following the trail of a possible paranoid... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: B004CAN3UI
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.

Customer Reviews

a social services-oriented mystery

What I like about Nancy Pickard is that she writes more than a mystery. She does a nice job here with the social services world. It is the balance between that world and the "crime fiction" that I was expecting that drew me in. She does a great job with settings -- most commonly in the few Jenny Cain books I've read, with the cold, dreary New England winters. She handles issues of mental illness in an adept and realistic fashion, without getting too heavy or losing the pacing that a mystery should hvae.

A decent little mystery

This novel is set in small-town New England and features Jenny Cain, the woman in charge of the areas philanthropical foundation (very much like Indianapolis' Lilly Foundation) that makes investments and gives grants for the public good. The foundation is asked to buy a building so that it can be converted into a recreation/meeting hall for the mentally ill of the community - a place where they can get out of the cold and still be welcome. But, things quickly get complicated when people start dying in and around the building and a mentally ill man is the main suspect. The characters are believable, the book is well-paced and the killer is a surprise (I thought I had it figured out for about half the book, but ... I was wrong).